Close Encounters
by MidnightRain6593
Summary: The first time she sees him, he's in a coffin, desiccated with a dagger through his heart and though she doesn't know it at the moment, it only escalates from there. Bonnie/Kol.


**Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries nor am I making any profit from this. Characters, etc. belong to their respective owners.**

**A/N: Silly as it sounds, this pairing is just right underneath my OTP, Bamon. We saw Kol for all of 60 seconds so far, but thanks to all the wonderful art and fics on Tumblr, I just can't resist this pairing.**

**Enjoy!**

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><p>The first time she sees him, he's in a coffin, desiccated with a dagger through his heart and though she doesn't know it at the moment, it only escalates from there.<p>

She's in the witches' house, trying to open a stubborn coffin that is spelled shut when curiosity gets the better of her and she starts looking in the other coffins.

The first coffin she opens contains Elijah. She doesn't feel any sympathy for his brother betraying him yet again. It was his own fault for betraying her and her friends.

The next coffin she opens has another man. His dark curly hair reaches down to his shoulders and his clothing suggests that he's been in the coffin for centuries.

The third coffin she opens is the one _he_ is in. Despite the gray pallor of his skin and the prominent veins he somehow manages to look peaceful and innocent and so _boyish._

She finds herself tempted to pull out the dagger and tries to rationalize it.

Klaus betrayed his own brothers, so if she pulled the dagger out of them wouldn't they want him dead?

Yet, logic pulls her back in and she realizes that no matter how angry anyone was with their family very few were actually capable of killing them, vampire or not. Stefan and Damon had proven that to her time and time again.

She shuts the coffin with a firm _thud_ and doesn't intend to ever open it again.

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><p>The second time she she's him is at the Originals' ball.<p>

She's surprised to even receive an invitation considering that Esther's first act after stepping out of the coffin was to knock her and Abby out.

She doesn't really want to go to the stupid ball because she already got the jeebies when she was around Stefan and Damon. She'd be ready to crawl out of her skin at a ball surrounded by the first and oldest vampires.

However, her friends insist that she should go.

"We all know that you stand the best chance against them since you're such a badass witch and all," Caroline tells her matter-of-factly and Bonnie can't help but smile at that a bit.

She doesn't bother to tell Abby that she's going to it because she doubts that the woman would care anyway.

That's how she finds herself standing in a large, overly grand room wearing a deep, forest green princess gown that Caroline insisted was absolutely necessary.

She feels awkward because she's not dancing and she refuses to drink. She's such a lightweight and getting drunk in a room full of vampires that probably wanted them dead would just be downright stupid.

Matt was kind enough to ask her to dance and Bonnie accepted because she could tell he felt even more out of place than her, but then Rebekah promptly whisked him away from her. Bonnie was hesitant to let him go, but she figured it wouldn't be smart for her to make the first violent move.

So, now she's standing off to the side scoping out the place. Rebekah is still with Matt who looks like he wants to run out of the place, screaming. Klaus is dancing with Caroline, which has her raising an eyebrow, but she supposes it is what it is. Elijah is conversing with the brother that she knows had to have been daggered for several hundred years. Esther was being a gracious host and conversing with part guests, but Bonnie knew that the older witch had been watching her out of the corner of her eye the entire night.

Her eyes start darting around the room trying to find the only one she hasn't seen yet. She finally sees him leaning against the staircase, champagne glass in hand and watching her intently with deep brown eyes.

She quickly looks away and walks over to another corner of the room that she hoped was out of his vantage point. It was one thing for her to stare down Originals, but it was another thing to be stared down by them.

She's not quite sure what she's supposed to do when he makes his way over to her.

_Be civil,_ she tells herself repeatedly. _Don't start giving people aneurisms or set the on fire._

"Would you care to dance?" He asks her politely, extending a hand towards her.

She looks down at that hand for a moment, debating her options. In the end she figures if Caroline can dance with Klaus without getting maimed, killed, or otherwise, then what was the worst that could happen?

_A question I don't want the answer to,_ she thinks wryly as she nods and places her small hand in his larger one, trying to ignore the cold shock that ran through her body on contact.

He leads her out to the dance floor, wrapping an arm around her waist, while grasping her hand as she places her free one on his shoulder. Her steps are a bit clumsy since she's never really done ballroom dancing before, but he's smooth enough to cover for her.

"I don't believe I have had the pleasure of meeting you yet," he told her. "My name is Kol."

"I'm Bonnie," she replies simply. Her green eyes meet his brown ones for the second time that night. It was his only feature that betrayed his real age.

"Ah, the Bennett witch."

"That's me." A bit of a dry tone creeps into her voice.

"You're not very talkative," he observes.

"I don't have a lot to talk about," she shoots back.

"Oh, I doubt that," he says with a smile. His teeth are blindly white and impossibly straight. "You simply don't want to say what's really on your mind, so you think it's better that you don't say anything at all."

"Then I suppose our conversation's over."

She removes her hands from him and tries to step away, but he just grips her tighter instead.

"I did not mean to offend you."

She hesitates for a moment before she moves her hands into their former positions.

The rest of the night is filled with unimportant small talk and dancing and by the end she thinks that maybe Kol isn't such a bad person despite being an Original. That didn't mean she was going to make a habit of interacting with him, though.

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><p>The third time she sees him is at that Grille.<p>

She's there for a bite to eat and to get as much homework done as she possibly can before things in Mystic Falls go to hell in a hand basket again. She has a tendency to fall behind in school when that happens.

She doesn't even notice his presence until he's standing beside her table, a bottle of some sort of alcohol in his hand.

"Do you mind if I join you?" he asks politely.

"I don't drink," she tells him.

"I know. This is for me."

Her lips curl into a small smile at that and she nods as she moves a physics textbook out of his way while he takes a seat across from her.

They sit in silence for a few moments before she decides to break it.

"What is your family doing in Mystic Falls?" she asks.

He raises his eyebrows at the question, but he knows that she simply doesn't beat around the bush if she can help it.

"It's our home," he replies simply. "We lived here before we even became vampires."

"Yeah, but _Mystic Falls?_ You guys could live anywhere in the world." Hell, if she had a choice, she would live _anywhere_ but Mystic Falls. If it meant she could get away from vampires and werewolves and hybrids and ghosts and whatever other freakish things the world held, she would live as an Eskimo in the North Pole.

"Nostalgia is a curious thing, Bonnie."

She likes that way he says her name. And as quickly as that thought pushes through her head, she pushes it out.

They spend the rest of the night in an oddly comfortable silence.

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><p>The fourth time she sees him, he saves her life.<p>

She had been at the witches' house, trying to ask for advice on how to deal with the Originals. For whatever reason, the no longer seemed to have a vested interest in the matter and refused to even speak to her.

Despite that they were her ancestors and had already done a lot for her, she can't help but be frustrated by their fickleness.

She's about a hundred feet away from the house when she's roughly slammed into a tree and comes face to face with a vampire she's never seen before.

Before she can so much as give an aneurism or spark a fire, the monster is yanked off of her. There's a gross squelching sound as the heart is ripped from its chest and it falls to the ground lifeless.

When the scene that just played out catches up with her brain, she sees Kol wiping blood off his hands with a handkerchief and all she can think is that she finds it a bit funny that he carries that little scrap of cloth on him. Then, she figures that he probably does it out of habit because he's basically just stepped out of the early twentieth century. Then, she decides that it has been a long night and she definitely needs sleep.

"Are you alright?" He asks, walking over to her and giving her a once-over to check for any damage.

"I'm fine," she replies. She'll probably have bruises on her back from where she hit the tree, but they would heal eventually.

"You shouldn't be out so late at night," he tells her.

She resists the urge to roll her eyes. "I can take care of myself."

He pointedly looks at the vampire's body.

"You just happened to get here and take care of him before I could."

He seems to know better than to argue with her because she's such a stubborn person and instead insists that he makes sure she gets home safely.

She tries to explain to him that her car wasn't too far away and that he didn't need to actually go all the way home with her because, really, who was going to attack her in her car? But she finds out that he can be just as stubborn as her especially when it comes to doing the 'gentlemanly' thing.

She should feel uncomfortable around him. He was an Original. He was Klaus's brother. For all she knew, he could have compelled the vampire to attack her so he could gain her trust. Paranoid, that she was, but one had to stay alive somehow.

He walks her to her front door like this had been some sort of messed up, grotesque date.

"I would invite you in," she says, "But it's late and I happen to have a strict no-vampires policy when it comes to my house."

His lips curl upwards into an adorable smile. "Goodnight, Bonnie."

She doesn't respond, but when he's heading down the walkway, words start coming out of her mouth.

"Kol?"

He stops and turns around.

"What's you and your family's evil, diabolical master plan?"

He laughs and it's a deep, smooth sound and she can't help but think that she would like to hear him laugh more.

"Who say we have one?" he asks.

"Who say you don't?" she shoots back.

"I do," he replies. "We're simply trying to learn how to be a family again."

Right there she almost envies him for that. She didn't really have a family. All she had was a father who was never there, a distant cousin she's only met once, a mother who abandoned her and still didn't really seem to care, and a dead grandmother. Her friends served as her family, but things just weren't what they used to be.

"Goodnight, Bonnie."

"Goodnight, Kol."

She lies in bed for hours that night before she finally manages to fall asleep. She dreams of a thousand year old vampire with boyish features and deep dark eyes that told the truth of his age.

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><p>The fifth time she sees him, she invites him into her home.<p>

She knows very well that it's something she could easily end up regretting later and she probably would, but she's bored and lonely and he was _there_.

They sit there in her living room and talk about everything and anything.

There was no denying that he was intelligent and could hold a conversation (he was over a thousand years old, after all), but she was pleased to find that she could also hold her own. She found herself explaining typical modern things to him like computers and iPods and cellphones and cars.

She loses track of time while they talk and before she knows it, she's waking up in her own bed, still wearing yesterday's clothes.

She assumes that Kol was the one who put her in bed since no one else had been in her house and she vaguely wonders how he knew which bedroom belonged to her.

Still, she can't help the wistful smile that spreads on her face whenever she thinks about last night. She can't remember the last time she had enjoyed just talking to someone so much.

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><p>Their nightly talks start to become a regular thing and she begins to wonder if she's finally lost her mind that she's so desperate for company that she'd accept it from an Original, but she simply can't deny how much she enjoys spending time with him and he had saved her life once (even though she still claims that she had the situation under perfect control).<p>

She begins to wonder if she's starting to feel something more for Kol than just simple friendship and she quickly squashes the thought from her head. Even if it were true, it simply couldn't happen and wouldn't happen.

Some nights they would talk until she fell asleep and he would put her to bed (she still hasn't asked how he knew where her room was) and other nights she would escort him to the front door and watch him walk away until he disappeared into the night or occasionally the early dawn.

The only other instances she can think of where she loses track of time so often was when she was performing a spell.

One night when she walks him to the door, he suddenly stops and turns in the doorway to face her. He towers over her small frame. She feels like a deer caught in headlights when he cups her cheeks and begins to bend down towards her. He gives her time to move away if she wants, but she doesn't. She _can't._

This kiss is soft and sweet and chaste, yet she finds herself gripping the dark fabric of his shirt in her hands, trying to ground herself from the lightheaded sensation she is feeling.

She knows that this is crazy. This whole thing was crazy. She was a witch. He was a thousand year old vampire, an _Original_. And she knows that he had to have a past that was steeped in blood and death and other horrific things because that's just what has to happen when you live for over a thousand years as a vampire.

But she can't deny how she feels about him or how she's felt closer to him than she has anyone else in a long time.

When he finally pulls away, he's still close to her and when he begins to speak, his lips brush against hers.

"Goodnight, Bonnie," he whispers softly.

She's left speechless.

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><p>Their nightly get-togethers are now filled with conversation and kisses.<p>

She almost feels like she did when her relationship with Jeremy started, yet it somehow feels better and more reliable, which made no sense because of who she was and who Kol was. Yet, somehow, it just _is._

Caroline and Elena are constantly questioning the giddy expression that she sometimes has on her face when she's caught daydreaming about Kol, but she just brushes it off and she knows that they'll eventually give up asking because they know that if she doesn't want to tell they'll never get it out of her unless it's a life or death situation.

He never makes a move to take things to the next level and she wonders if he's waiting for her to make the first move in that direction or if he's simply happy with where they are. He _did _have a tendency to be old-fashioned. Either way, she was content with what they had so far.

Though, it didn't stop her from asking one night, "What are we?"

"What do you want us to be?" He replies, one hand buried in her dark curls while the other cups her cheek.

"I don't know," she whispers as her small, delicate fingers trace his smooth jaw. "Us. I just want us to be…_us."_

He smiles that adorable smile she loves so much before he leans in and kisses her deeply.

That night she loses her virginity to him.

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><p>She doesn't know what direction they're heading in or what the future holds for them.<p>

What she does know is that she's fallen deep for him. She loves the way he talks, the way he smiles like he knows things that no one else in the world does (which was probably true), the way he kisses her, the way he makes love to her, the way he sleeps while holding her close. She loved his scent, his eyes, his smooth jawline. She loved everything about him.

She loved _him._

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><p><strong>AN: Like everything I write, I start off with a plan in my head and then it takes off on its own and becomes something **_**completely**_** different this somehow became fluffy. Anyway, I hope some of you found this enjoyable and I have a feeling that this definitely won't be my last dip into this pairing.**

**Reviews, favorites, etc. are very much appreciated!**


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